Battery Monitor revamp

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday, May 24, 2013 10:05:35 kde at privat.broulik.de wrote:
> A screenshot can be found here:
> http://privat.broulik.de/batterymonitornew1.png

tried it out and Marco (who is visiting for a few days) and i looked it over. 
see these screenshots for some layouting issues:

http://wstaw.org/m/2013/05/25/kai_battery_1.png
http://wstaw.org/m/2013/05/25/kai_battery_2.png

also, after expanding a battery to see detailed information, collapsing it 
leaves an empty space. that should re-collapse, similar to thow the 
notifications plasmoid does.

overall it is showing some massive improvements over what we've had 
previously, so kudos for that.

> What's new:
>   - Battery percentage is shown as a graph too
>   - Battery type is determined and visually represented (ie. mouse
> battery has mouse icon)
>   - Battery name and vendor is shown

this looks pretty odd in the tooltip .. is that information actually useful in 
the tooltip, which is mean to be for quick-glance information, or does it just 
confront the user with jargon?

also, would be nice to align the content in the tooltip with a (i know, 
horrible:) html table. we do this elsewhere and it looks a lot nicer. 
currently there is not much in the way of alignment:

	http://wstaw.org/m/2013/05/25/kai_battery_3.png


and having the labels right aligned and the information left aligned would be 
a big boost to readability and cleanliness.

>   - Additional information such as capacity is shown. Can be further
> extended later to show eg. serial number or recall message

very nice..

>   - All batteries (primary, mouse, power supply and non-power-supply)
> are listed

sadly my wireless mouse battery is not shown. it doesn't show up in upower so 
it's not the fault of powerdevil .. but i wish i could see this :)

>   - Support for keyboard backlight brightness

oddly, 

>   - AC Adapter plugged in is indicated by using the battery-charging
> icons for the batteries, if a battery is charging, it fades in and out
> smoothly. (So we get a distinction between "Oh noes my charger is
> broken" and "Oh my battery is not charging")

very nice; one thing that Marco noted was that it should only be animating 
when the popup is open (haven't checked if that's the case).

to me, the easing curve also seems a bit .. not right. after changing the 
InQuad to InCubic in BatteryItem.qml line 117 it feels a lot more like it is 
charging.

> What's missing:
>   - Remaining time. There is no "global" category anymore and since we
> discourage and removed the option for displaying remaining time, I
> didn't see the need to implement it in solod so we can show it in eg.
> the battery advanced properties

fine with me. as i've noted numerous times before, remaining time is inherently 
innacurate. it is only accurate over long periods of (statistically) 
consistent power draw. in a modern system, that is generally not the case. one 
visit to youtube can ruin your expectations ;)

>   - Suspend and resume buttons. Not sure where to put them.

marco, who is visiting at the moment, and i just talked about this and here 
are our thoughts:

we noticed these buttons were gone as well, and we're not sure they need to be 
there. i really have a hard time justifying those buttons being there: we have 
them in the application launcher (kickoff), we have them in krunner, we have 
plasmoids that provide just those buttons, etc. suspend is also linked to lid 
close on laptops by default. 

so as a power management UI, things like brightness make sense. but session 
management related things? hm. we think not :)

so we'd vote for leaving them out.

we'd also vote for getting rid of the option to show the percentage overlay on 
the battery icon. it could be shown on desktop when the plasmoid gets to a 
certain size, and instead of floating in the middle of the battery (which looks 
not so nice) it could perhaps appear in a small strip that overlays the 
battery across the full width at the very bottom?

and then we can get rid of the entire config page that contains the two options 
for showing the suspend buttons and the overlay! voila!

> What's broken:
>   - Backlight controls detection (which is why that slider isn't shown
> in the screenshot). I tried to make the check work properly but didn't
> succeed so far. In current master it always returns true

the problem is in powerdevil?

> PS: I'm still not convinced on *not* using a Switch for the power
> management option.

Switches are not to be used on Desktop. For 4.11 the QML switch component 
appears as a checkbox, so you really don't have a choice in the end. The 
reasons are:

* consistency
* input device appropriateness
* people use them poorly on desktop (just look at UIs that use them 
extensively on desktop and what the layouts end up looking like .. horrendous, 
often with labels on the left and switch crammed far off to the right. just 
like in this draft of the battery, actually, which ends up having an odd 
widget floating off on its own)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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